Scholarly Agenda & Pedagogical Praxis

My scholarship examines how Black speculative practices function as literacies of memory, survival, protest, and worldmaking—and how those practices can transform writing, teaching, cultural interpretation, and public life.

Grounded in Black feminist thought, memory and trauma studies, and African diasporic ways of knowing, my work asks how Black people—especially Black women, Black girls, Black disabled people, artists, educators, and cultural workers—have imagined, remembered, written, taught, healed, and created toward freedom, even under conditions designed to make freedom seem impossible.

Across my work as a scholar, educator, writer, filmmaker, curriculum developer, and public humanist, I return to a central conviction: imagination is not separate from intellectual inquiry. It is one of the ways we interpret history, preserve knowledge, confront inherited realities, and compose possibilities that do not yet exist.

My Scholarly Agenda

My scholarly agenda brings together Black speculative imagination, writing and literacy studies, African diasporic spirituality, Black feminist thought, memory and trauma studies, disability justice, cultural production, and liberatory pedagogy.

At the center of this work is an inquiry into how Black people use writing, storytelling, art, ritual, education, and collective memory to make meaning under conditions of rupture. I am interested not only in what Black expressive works represent, but also in what they do: how they carry memory, challenge dominant narratives, produce knowledge, create community, and make other ways of living imaginable.

My scholarship is especially concerned with Black women writers, artists, and thinkers whose creative and intellectual labor offers theories of survival, transformation, and worldmaking. I bring early African American and Caribbean women writers into conversation with contemporary Afrofuturism, Black feminist and womanist thought, African diasporic spiritual systems, disability justice, popular culture, writing studies, and public humanities.

This work develops through two interrelated lines of inquiry: Black speculative cultural inquiry and Black speculative literacies and writing pedagogy. One examines literature, film, art, memory, spirituality, and popular culture as sites of Black intellectual production. The other investigates what Black speculative and feminist traditions can teach us about writing, rhetoric, literacy, knowledge-making, curriculum, and learning communities.

These are not separate scholarly agendas. They are connected approaches to a larger question: How do Black people interpret inherited worlds and create language, practices, relationships, and stories through which more livable worlds can be composed?

Practical Afrofuturism

A central framework within my work is what I call Practical Afrofuturism: the study and practice of Black speculative imagination as a method of inquiry, cultural critique, education, creativity, community-building, healing, and social transformation.

Practical Afrofuturism understands Afrofuturism as more than a literary genre, visual aesthetic, or representation of Black people in the future. It approaches Afrofuturism as a way of reading history, confronting trauma, honoring ancestral knowledge, questioning the apparent inevitability of the present, and imagining otherwise.

It asks not only what futures Black people can imagine, but how speculative imagination changes what we do now: how we write, teach, research, gather, remember, create, and build community. It treats imagination as a serious intellectual and material practice—a way of recognizing what has been hidden or distorted, recovering what has been carried forward, and creating what existing structures have declared impossible.

Practical Afrofuturism brings literature, storytelling, cultural memory, ritual, reflection, critical inquiry, and creative practice together. It helps us consider how Black communities have always made life, meaning, knowledge, and possibility in the face of historical rupture.

Interrelated Lines of Inquiry

Black Speculative Cultural Inquiry

This area of my scholarship examines Black literature, film, visual culture, spirituality, performance, and public memory as sites of intellectual and theoretical production.

I am especially interested in how Black women writers, artists, and cultural workers use speculative practices to confront racial, gendered, colonial, and historical violence without allowing violence or trauma to become the whole of Black existence. Their work offers ways to think about memory, embodiment, pleasure, spirituality, disability, ancestral knowledge, survival, and transformation.

Through this line of inquiry, I consider questions such as: What becomes possible when Black literature and cultural production are allowed to generate theory? What forms of knowledge become available when we take seriously the speculative work of Black women? How do popular, literary, visual, and spiritual forms preserve cultural memory while also helping communities imagine beyond the conditions they have inherited?

This work encompasses my research on early African American and Caribbean women’s writing, Black speculative fiction, Afrofuturist cultural production, trauma and memory, Black feminist theory, African diasporic spirituality, disability justice, and works of popular culture that have not always been treated as intellectually generative.

Black Speculative Literacies and Writing Pedagogy

This area of my scholarship examines Afrofuturism as a literacy practice: a way of reading inherited worlds, questioning their organizing assumptions, and composing alternatives.

I use the term Black speculative literacies to describe the interpretive, rhetorical, creative, and communal practices through which Black people read reality, preserve memory, challenge dominant narratives, produce knowledge, and imagine beyond existing limitations. These literacies can be found in traditional written texts, but also in oral storytelling, film, music, visual art, movement, ritual, digital media, personal narrative, and other forms of cultural expression.

This line of inquiry asks what Black speculative and Black feminist traditions can contribute to Writing Studies. It considers how those traditions might expand our understanding of voice, audience, evidence, rhetoric, inquiry, embodiment, revision, intellectual authority, and the relationship between lived experience and scholarly knowledge.

I am particularly interested in how students use writing, research, reflection, storytelling, and multimodal composition to understand themselves as thinkers and knowledge producers. I also consider how speculative methods can help students examine the worlds they have inherited, recognize that those worlds were constructed, and participate in composing more just and livable alternatives.

As a Teaching Professor in Writing and Critical Inquiry, I am increasingly interested in the writing program as a community of practice: a space where faculty produce pedagogical knowledge collectively through teaching, reflection, conversation, experimentation, and revision. This opens important questions about how liberatory pedagogies move beyond individual classrooms, how teachers learn from one another, and how writing programs might create institutional conditions that support meaningful inquiry, access, creativity, and intellectual risk-taking.

Guiding Research Questions

My scholarly and creative work is shaped by several guiding questions:

• How have Black women writers, artists, educators, and cultural workers used speculative imagination to confront racial, gendered, colonial, and historical violence?
• How do memory, trauma, spirituality, embodiment, ritual, and ancestral knowledge shape Black literature, cultural production, and practices of survival?
• What becomes possible when Black literature, popular culture, and creative practice are understood as forms of intellectual and theoretical production?
• What does Afrofuturism become when it is understood not only as a genre or aesthetic, but also as a literacy practice, pedagogy, spiritual practice, public humanities method, and liberatory praxis?
• What can Black speculative and Black feminist traditions teach Writing Studies about voice, power, evidence, identity, inquiry, revision, and the production of knowledge?
• How can writing classrooms, curricula, and communities of practice help students and educators examine inherited worlds and participate in composing more livable ones?

Pedagogy as Scholarly Praxis

Education is the foundation of freedom. But freedom does not begin or end in a classroom. It lives in how we imagine, question, write, create, remember, and connect.

Teaching is not separate from my intellectual work. It is one of the places where I develop, enact, and refine my questions about writing, knowledge, memory, power, and possibility. I understand teaching as a form of scholarly and public praxis: a way of bringing ideas into relationship with people, communities, institutions, and the material conditions of everyday life.

My pedagogy is grounded in the belief that learning should transform us. It should help students become more critical, creative, reflective, and self-aware thinkers. The classroom should be a space of inquiry, rigor, imagination, and care—a place where students learn not only how to analyze texts and develop arguments, but also how to ask deeper questions about themselves, their communities, and the worlds they are inheriting and shaping.

I teach writing, literature, Afrofuturism, cultural studies, and critical inquiry through a liberatory and student-centered framework. My courses invite students to understand writing as a process of discovery and meaning-making rather than simply a finished product to be evaluated. I want students to recognize that their ideas matter, their questions matter, and their lived experiences can inform intellectual inquiry without being treated as substitutes for careful research and analysis.

My teaching is shaped by Black feminist thought, Afrofuturism, Writing Studies, public humanities, disability justice, and culturally responsive pedagogy. Students engage texts, images, films, music, archives, material culture, and lived experiences as sites of knowledge. They are not passive recipients of information. They are thinkers, writers, researchers, interpreters, collaborators, and world-builders.

Writing is central to this praxis because writing asks us to slow down, notice patterns, follow questions, listen carefully, reconsider assumptions, and revise our thinking. It helps students enter intellectual conversations with clarity and purpose. It also makes visible the relationships between writing and voice, writing and power, writing and memory, writing and freedom.

Afrofuturism strengthens this work because it allows students to approach imagination as a serious mode of inquiry. Through Afrofuturism, students can examine history, technology, race, gender, disability, environment, spirituality, and culture while asking what other arrangements of power, knowledge, and community might be possible. Imagination does not replace analysis. It deepens analysis by helping students recognize that the present world is neither natural nor inevitable.

Five Guiding Principles

Education Is for Everyone

Knowledge lives in books, bodies, communities, archives, art, stories, cultural traditions, and lived experience. My teaching honors multiple ways of knowing while helping students develop the skills to move among personal, cultural, public, and scholarly forms of knowledge.

Students enter the classroom from different starting points. Access does not mean lowering expectations. It means creating the conditions in which students can meet meaningful expectations with clarity, support, rigor, and dignity.

Imagination Is Resistance

Afrofuturism, storytelling, and speculative practices challenge what appears fixed and create space for what could be. Imagination is not a retreat from reality. It is one of the tools we use to interpret reality, expose its limits, and begin reshaping it.

Learning Engages the Whole Self

Intellectual work does not happen separately from memory, identity, emotion, embodiment, culture, or experience. I incorporate reflection, personal narrative, creative practice, and culturally grounded inquiry so that students can make meaningful connections between course material, lived experience, and the larger structures shaping their lives.

Learning with the whole self does not mean abandoning rigor. It means recognizing that rigorous inquiry becomes more powerful when students understand why the questions matter and how they are connected to the world.

Writing Is a Practice of Meaning-Making

Writing is not simply the record of thought completed elsewhere. Writing is one of the ways thought develops. Through drafting, reflection, research, conversation, and revision, students discover what they think, identify what they still need to know, and learn how to communicate with others.

I encourage students to approach writing as an evolving intellectual practice rather than a performance of perfection. Revision is not punishment for getting something wrong. It is evidence that thinking is still happening.

Community Is the Classroom

Learning is communal. Students learn from texts, from educators, from themselves, and from one another. A classroom becomes a community through shared responsibility, sustained conversation, careful listening, intellectual generosity, and the willingness to remain present when ideas become complicated.

This principle extends beyond the individual classroom. Educators also need communities of practice in which they can reflect, experiment, exchange knowledge, and imagine what their programs and institutions might become.

In Practice

Reading and Writing as Inquiry

Students learn to move from observation to interpretation, from interpretation to questioning, and from questioning to research and sustained analysis. Reading and writing become connected processes through which students investigate texts, ideas, histories, communities, and cultural practices.

Storytelling and Reflection

Whether students are analyzing literature, studying film, conducting research, or composing personal scholarly narratives, storytelling remains central. Journaling, reflection, discussion, and creative projects help students examine how individual experiences connect to cultural histories and larger structures of power.

Critical and Creative Practice

Critical inquiry and creative practice do not have to live on opposite sides of the curriculum. Students may analyze speculative texts while also creating their own visions, narratives, archives, or multimodal projects. Creative work gives students another way to test ideas, make arguments, and understand how form shapes meaning.

Collaboration and Community

Students need opportunities to think with one another. Discussion, peer response, collaborative inquiry, debates, workshops, and shared projects help students practice listening, articulating ideas, revising their positions, and contributing to a learning community.

Access, Care, and Intellectual Rigor

I design courses for students with varied educational experiences, abilities, identities, and relationships to academic writing. I provide multiple ways to engage ideas while maintaining clear and meaningful expectations. Care and rigor are not opposites. Care helps create the conditions under which rigorous learning becomes possible.

What Students Carry Forward

I want students to leave my courses with stronger writing, research, and critical-thinking practices, but I also want them to carry something more.

I want them to understand that they are capable of asking consequential questions. I want them to recognize themselves as participants in intellectual and public conversations. I want them to know that writing is not merely something they complete for a grade; it is a tool they can use to discover, remember, challenge, communicate, and create.

I want students to develop a deeper relationship to imagination—not as fantasy removed from material life, but as part of how we critique the world, recover what has been obscured, and envision what else might be possible.

Teaching, for me, is a form of public scholarship and worldmaking. It is one of the ways we practice freedom in real time.

My work is rooted in the belief that Black imagination is not escape. It is evidence. It is method. It is memory. It is strategy. It is one of the ways we have always made life possible—and one of the means through which we continue to write, teach, and build beyond the limitations of the present.